High performance way to share a NVMe RAID array across multiple VM guests

[Sandbo]

Hi,

I don't really have the need for speed regarding the title, but I can't help wondering what would be the most efficient (and maybe fastest) way to share an array across multiple VM/LXC guests.

I am asking as I currently rely on a Linux Bridge which does not attach to physical port for transferring data among the VMs. This bridge is applied as an adapter inside a router VM (IPFire) which links to its DHCP server. In this case, via iPerf3, I could get up to ~ 22 Gbps of transfer among the guests. This is probably not the best practice but maybe the simplest to implement. Interestingly, I have seen this number (22 Gbps) on two different hosts with different CPU/MB and router OS, so I was guessing this limit might come from Proxmox (kindly correct me if I am wrong).

22 Gbps is a lot for my current harddisk RAID 6 array, but if I am moving to a high speed NVMe RAID (say it reaches > 22 Gbps), how should this be done?
One possible use case is that if one needs to run data acquisition on a Windows guest, and data is stored onto the NVMe SSD RAID, which is later further analysed by a Linux guest. A fast SSD storage accessible by multiple VMs simultaneously will be desired.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

I have seen this number (22 Gbps) on two different hosts with different CPU/MB and router OS, so I was guessing this limit might come from Proxmox (kindly correct me if I am wrong).

The Linux bridge speed is related to the CPU clock speed.

Sharing files between VM/CT work only with network shares. Theoretically, you could also share with 9p for KVM and bind mounts for CT.
But 9p is unsafe and not very fast.
My last 9p test was about 20MB but this is over 3 years ago.